Enthuware says, "Class names can serve as a valid identifier"
For instance:
is a valid statement?
Doesn't this introduce confusion and errors, perhaps even worse than shadowing? What is the logic of Java programming language to allow a Class name to serve as a valid identifier?
I can create a new class and call it, say, "Thumbnail". Does that mean that I shouldn't be able to name any of my variables "Thumbnail"? What would happen if I already had a project with several hundred classes and many of them had variables named "Thumbnail", and then the new intern came in and created a "Thumbnail" class? Should my old code not compile any more? That wouldn't be nice.
Yes, it can be confusing. And yes, it's bad form to do that. It's just that it's impossible to write a specification which defines what sequences of characters can serve as variable names if you have to impose a condition like that.
To add to the confusion, you can create generic types of class names like MyClass<String> here the String is a new type which we created (like E or T) not java.lang.String (unrelated but I thought you should know)...
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